Texts in Conversation
In 2 Samuel 22, fire comes from God’s mouth, using storm-deity imagery to describe his anger. The Greek Septuagint changes this to fire coming from his anger, possibly due to confusion about the Hebrew or to avoid using human-like language for God.
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2500 BCE
1000+ CE
2 Samuel 22:9
Hebrew Bible
7 In my distress I called to the Lord; I called to my God. From his heavenly temple he heard my voice; he listened to my cry for help. 8 The earth heaved and shook; the foundations of the sky trembled. They heaved because he was angry. 9 Smoke ascended from his nose; fire devoured as it came from his mouth; he hurled down fiery coals. 10 He made the sky sink as he descended; a thick cloud was under his feet.
Date: 600–501 BCE (based on scholarly estimates)
LXX 2 Samuel 22:9
Septuagint
8 And the earth was troubled and quaked, and the foundations of heaven were confounded and torn apart, because the Lord was angry with them. 9 There went up a smoke in his fierce anger, and fire out of his mouth devours: coals were kindled at it. 10 And he bowed the heavens, and came down, and there was darkness under his feet. 11 And he rode upon the cherubs and flew, and was seen upon the wings of the wind.
Date: 100–1 BCE (based on scholarly estimates)
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Notes and References
"... Within a theophany-tale, the Masoretic text of 2 Samuel 22:9 offers “fire devours from his mouth”, whereas the Antiochene text offers “fire proceeds from his face”. Given the morphological similarity of מפיו (= ἐκ στόµατος αὐτοῦ) to מפניו (= ἐκ προσώπου αὐτοῦ), the change was perhaps made already in the Hebrew tradition, but we do not know why: neither the Masoretic nor the Antiochene reading is really understandable. Concluding this paragraph, I repeat the warning given at the beginning: individual translators grappled with how to deal with anthropomorphisms. Some felt the necessity to render their Vorlage faithfully. In later times, allegorical interpretation was a help for Jews and Christians in explaining in a satisfying way phrases that were disturbing to them. In later times, the strategy of accommodation justified biblical anthropomorphisms. ..."
Martin Meiser, The Septuagint and Its Reception: Collected Essays (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2022), 15.
* The use of references are not endorsements of their contents. Please read the entirety of the provided reference(s) to understand the author's full intentions regarding the use of these texts.
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